after I Dream in Another Language (2017)



No language like the depth of a wound through the years.
Here amidst the silence is everything I wish to tell you: how to build a fire, the dwindling number of

hornbills, my first encounter with the military.
We understand the world by the sound of its trees.
The word means either forest or war, an understandable mistake here.
I come into the language as I do into a meadow.
In the small patch of grass, illumined by sunlight, I see every organism.
The language is generous; it has two words for sunrise: igsilo and pamalatas.
A language dies like a hornbill population dies.
Dying means the same thing as falling asleep.
When I die, I will spend every day looking up at the sunlight filtering through the trees.
Until then, I have my entire life to tell you everything I’ve seen.
Every morning, we encounter the world in the language of

                                                                                             leaves,  grief,  hoof,  beak,  branch,  scale,  smoke,

                                                                                             river,  root,  rage,  field,  sunlight,  fog,  love,

                                                                                             stone,  moss,  advance,  silence,  flight,  shadow,  war…